Monday, November 02, 2009

When I was in Graduate School I figured out that fascism and communism were very similar and are both the opposite of capitalism, something that Democrats have not seemed to have figured out yet. I think my awakening came from reading the works of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. I also always read Walter Lippmann. I recently read that Walter Lippman pointed out during the 1930's that socialism, fascism, communism, progressivism, and even liberalism were all the same: authoritarian collectivists. Here is Ayn Rand's view of communism and fascism as contrasted with Capitalism.

"It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of 'Freedom or dictatorship?' into 'Which kind of dictatorship?' -- thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice -- according to the proponents of that fraud -- is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism). That fraud collapsed in the 1940's, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory -- that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state -- that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders -- that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique -- that fascism is not the product of the political 'right,' but of the 'left' -- that the basic issue is not 'rich versus poor,' but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government -- which means: capitalism versus socialism." --philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Our current President is the master of the false choice as described above by Ayn Rand.